Pink Floyd: Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live

PINK FLOYD: IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? THE WALL LIVE (1980-1981; 2000)

1) Master Of Ceremonies; 2) In The Flesh?; 3) The Thin Ice; 4) Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 1; 5) The Happiest Days Of Our Lives; 6) Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2; 7) Mother; 8) Goodbye Blue Sky; 9) Empty Spaces; 10) What Shall We Do Now?; 11) Young Lust; 12) One Of My Turns; 13) Donʼt Leave Me Now; 14) Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 3; 15) The Last Few Bricks; 16) Goodbye Cruel World; 17) Hey You; 18) Is There Anybody Out There?; 19) Nobody Home; 20) Vera; 21) Bring The Boys Back Home; 22) Comfortably Numb; 23) The Show Must Go On; 24) Master Of Ceremonies; 25) In The Flesh; 26) Run Like Hell; 27) Waiting For The Worms; 28) Stop!; 29) The Trial; 30) Outside The Wall.

General verdict: Needs video.

The most awful thing about Floydʼs legendary live Wall shows from 1980–81 is that, apparently, no high quality footage was ever captured — whatever remains, as you can easily see from YT videos, is barely watchable. Of course, Rogerʼs several solo-based stagings of the album, one of which has already been reviewed, are a partial remedy for this travesty, but only partial, because it is one thing to watch The Wall as a bona fide musical, replete with a motley assortment of musical guests of widely varying quality, and it would be quite another thing to watch it as the freshest chapter in the personal history of Pink Floyd while it still existed as a band (despite Rick Wright being already denominated to the status of «supporting musician»).

The audio tapes from the show did survive; but it does make sense that they were not released upon the completion of the project, and I do not even think there were any such plans — as we know all too well, the classic Floyd line up did not think much of the idea of live albums, given how important the visual aspect was for their live activities. So it was not until the year 2000 that these tapes were dug out, brushed off, sorted out, and transformed into a record that promised to bring you all (well, half) of the value of the classic live Floyd experience — a reasonable time gap, given that loyal fans had probably worn off twenty copies of the studio Wall in twenty years and were fully prepared for something slightly different.

As it happens, my warning is fully predictable — Is There Anybody Out There? is a record that will only appeal to the seasoned fan. First, its very nature is that of a self-contradictory compromise: on one hand, it claims to be a genuine live experience, but on the other hand, its tracks are put together from more separate parts than a John Entwistle bass guitar — almost every song is dated to at least two or three different shows, either because producer James Guthrie embarked on a typically Floydian perfectionist cruise, looking for musically ideal bits, or because some parts of the tapes had degraded in quality. Quality control does take care of that issue — without the accompanying notes, youʼd never know it wasnʼt all just one show — but the other issue is that it all sounds largely and inevitably inferior to the studio version, and that issue cannot be taken care of by any means, be it editing, mixing, or magic.

On a purely formal level, The Wall Live is a more complete Wall experience than the studio version, because lack of the 2-LP time limit had allowed the band to reinstate certain bits that were cut off from the final release. Unfortunately, Roger and David were pretty good at cutting off, and the reinstated bits feel superfluous. The short ʽWhat Shall We Do Now?ʼ, bridging the formerly startling and disturbing sonic gap between ʽEmpty Spacesʼ and ʽYoung Lustʼ, is two minutes of mediocre arena-rock (ʽYoung Lustʼ is arena-rock, too, but at least it is parodic / ironic arena-rock, whereas this thing is just a technical interlude). ʽThe Show Must Go Onʼ restores an earlier cut verse — oh, what a joy. ʽOutside The Wallʼ is the worst of them all, having become a hillbilly campfire song with overdubbed pretentious narration, instead of its enigmatic quietness and looping tricks on the original album. And there are also ʽThe Last Few Bricksʼ, a medley of several musical themes from the albumʼs first part, played onstage by the musicians as the wall was being completed, brick by brick — something that, quite clearly, only works together with the hypnotic spectacle of the band being gradually hidden from your eyes by all the white stuff. In the end, none of these tracks make the experience better, and some of them make it worse.

Of all the performances here, arguably the only one that made me sit up and take notice was ʽRun Like Hellʼ — "this is for all the WEAK people in the audience!". Somehow, the level of mean aggression required for this tune was seriously upped, perhaps due to Gilmourʼs guitar sounding harsher and crisper than in the studio — and the song gets an incredibly weird instrumental section here, with elements of almost free-form jazz chaos as guitars and pianos clash with each other in dissonant madness. ʽComfortably Numbʼ, on the other hand, did not yet have the proper time to transform itself into an end-of-the-world anthem that could function separately from the album itself, and Gilmour, standing on top of the wall, plays it relatively safe and close to the book (though I am sure many fans will prefer this early, fuzz-drenched reading of the closing solo to the more straightforward guitar-god-show-off it would become in the post-Waters years).

Many of the studio nuances are unknowingly or inevitably lost in transition — for instance, my favorite song on the album, ʽDonʼt Leave Me Nowʼ, is nowhere near as efficient live, because they cannot reproduce that hypnotic, climactic sustained guitar-vocal unison in the coda. The solo in ʽAnother Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2ʼ is extended by having a second guitarist take after David (Snowy White, I presume), which does not make for a particularly great contrast. All in all, there are plenty of small differences, but these are mostly for enthusiasts to spot, and even if some of them turn out to be more true to the vision of Roger Waters than, say, Bob Ezrin, it still only goes to show how much of the magic of Pink Floyd was generated inside the studio and how hard it was to bottle that magic and carry it intact to the stage.

That said, The Wall is The Wall, and at the very least you do get to hear it live without all the guest stars — when you can have Gilmour himself for ʽYoung Lustʼ, whoʼd want Bryan Adams? If you are a major fan of the album, this live companion is still a must-own. But ultimately, it will just serve as an indirect memento of one of rock theaterʼs most important and inventive events, in the absence of a high quality direct memento of such. 

Pink Floyd: P.U.L.S.E.

PINK FLOYD: P.U.L.S.E. (1995)

CD I: 1) Shine On You Crazy Diamond; 2) Astronomy Domine; 3) What Do You Want From Me?; 4) Learning To Fly; 5) Keep Talking; 6) Coming Back To Life; 7) Hey You; 8) A Great Day For Freedom; 9) Sorrow; 10) High Hopes; 11) Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2.

CD II: 1) Speak To Me; 2) Breathe; 3) On The Run; 4) Time; 5) The Great Gig In The Sky; 6) Money; 7) Us And Them; 8) Any Colour You Like; 9) Brain Damage; 10) Eclipse; 11) Wish You Were Here; 12) Comfortably Numb; 13) Run Like Hell.

General verdict: A perfectly listenable live experience — give the guys a passing grade, then move on without looking back.

Back in 1995, the release of Pink Floydʼs second post-Waters live album was a pretty major event. It seemed as if Gilmour and Co. were actually willing to learn from their mistakes and produce an audio-and-video package that would become forever etched as the ultimate live Floyd experience. Everything was taken care of: the stage show, the visuals, the setlist, the sound quality, even the packaging with its famous blinking red light — the one that made every devoted fanʼs life a living hell because the stinking AA battery would die every six months and you had to run out for replacements, praying that it was really the battery and not the LED flasher itself. (Later editions, fortunately, dropped the blinking light altogether — I wonder if there are people around whose copy is still blinking?).

Two things do indeed separate P.U.L.S.E. from Delicate Sound Of Thunder and make it a much more reliable Dave Floyd-era document for all those who are not connected to the 1987-88 shows with a special nostalgic thread. First, as we move into the 1990s, the live performances are being freed of the previous decadeʼs infamous production gimmicks — the keyboards sound livelier, the drums less glossy, and all the technophilia are now strictly controllable. Second, and even more important, P.U.L.S.E. is structured in such a way that it is not automatically perceived as a «greatest-hits-live» album — this is made by cleverly integrating a few oldies together with the new material on Disc 1, and by performing Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety, not just the hit songs, on Disc 2. By the time you realize that they did actually perform all the exact same hit songs as they did in 1988, it is too late to be disappointed.

Unfortunately, both of these advantages have somewhat dulled with the passing of time. There is no escaping the general feeling that even as late as 1994–95, the bandʼs shoulders were still heavy with the «burden of proof» — proving to the fans that they were still Pink Floyd without Roger Waters, and that they could go on as a creative force without Roger Waters. To achieve the first task, they go as far as resurrecting ʽAstronomy Domineʼ, but even then they play a short and sanitized version, a far cry from the psychedelic extravaganza that you hear on Ummagumma (let alone the Syd days, the song was still a blast in the early post-Syd period). To complete the second, they predictably play a lot of material from The Division Bell, but the live versions do not add much to the studio versions of the songs — ʽHigh Hopesʼ is every bit as poignant here, but not an iota more poignant, if you know what I mean.

The performance of Dark Side is passable, and it is fun to hear Clare Torryʼs vocal part on ʽGreat Gig In The Skyʼ divided between all three of the bandʼs backing vocalists (including Sam Brown of ʽStop!ʼ fame, though at this moment, I suppose, most people are familiar with her through her involvement in both P.U.L.S.E. and Concert For George) — but now that we actually have official access to 1972–75 performances of the material (on various deluxe editions of the old catalog), the historical importance of this show has dimmed, and the live setting without the accompanying visuals and laser effects adds little to the studio originals. Throw in the fact that they are still including a rather out-of-place reggae-ish section in the middle of ʽMoneyʼ, and that Gilmourʼs solo on ʽTimeʼ is quite far from monumental, and the whole thing is just a gesture, to which there is no real need to return.

For quite a long time, P.U.L.S.E. did contain what many viewed as the definitive version of the ʽComfortably Numbʼ solo — expertly constructed, lengthy, violent, culminating in a shower of mind-blowing psychedelic bends that worked particularly well in conjunction with the huge overhead globe opening its petals to blind everybody out of existence. It is still a magnificent experience, but, in my opinion, it has now been eclipsed by Gilmourʼs performance in Pompeii twenty years later — not as ecstatic or flashy, but cutting much closer to the heart (and, might I add, with a much better guitar tone and sound mix). And this particular eclipse is quite symbolic of the overall experience: P.U.L.S.E. is simply too much saddled with this prove-yourself-and-give-the-people-what-they-want attitude for me to be able to succumb to its charms a quarter century later. 

Pink Floyd: The Division Bell

PINK FLOYD: THE DIVISION BELL (1994)

General verdict: A tired, derivative, and washed-out nostalgic prayer thatʼs as honest and sympathetic as the finest in tired, derivative, washed-out nostalgic prayers go.

Critically slammed upon release with just as much verbal venom as A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, it might look like The Division Bell is one more of those albums in desperate need of a fair reassessment — especially in this new era when Angry Artistic Assholes such as John Lennon or Roger Waters are starting to (at least temporarily) lose the battle to Pleasant Polite Personalities such as Paul McCartney or Rick Wright (Gilmour, I guess, sits somewhere in the middle between these two, though still probably closer to PPP than to AAA). So far, however, I have not seen much activism on the matter; and the main reason, I think, is that The Division Bell simply holds no appeal whatsoever to the younger generations — of all nominally Floyd albums, this one is the most openly «boomer-oriented» of the lot, meaning it would be totally uncool, at best, to defend it around 2020.

Roughly speaking, The Division Bell in its entirety is one long, juicy, self-absorbed nostalgic trip. Recycled musical ideas with slight variations; lyrics almost completely centered on past memories and experiences; guitar solos that weave a near-constant fabric of light nostalgic melancholy — everything here screams, one way or another, that the course has been run and that this bandʼs best days are long, long gone. But at least there is a hint of honesty about it, one that was missing on Momentary Lapse Of Reason, an album whose production values, moments of puffed-up anger and occasional stabs at social relevance gave the illusion of a band ready to move forward with the times. On The Division Bell, Gilmour and Wright are busy doing what they actually want to do and what they can do, freeing themselves from the social obligation to prove that Pink Floyd can continue to be a progressive force even without Waters. If what they want to do is simply shed a tear about how "the grass was greener", we have every right to empathize with that tear.

Except you have to wait a long, long, long time to get around to ʽHigh Hopesʼ, arguably the albumʼs culmination. Before that, you have to sit through ʽCluster Oneʼ, a nice and forgettable instrumental in the vein of ʽShine Onʼ, but with no memorable guitar lines; ʽWhat Do You Want From Meʼ, the albumʼs most energetically aggressive blues-rocker in the vein of ʽHave A Cigarʼ, but without that songʼs bitter sense of sarcastic humour; ʽPoles Apartʼ, seven minutes of pleasant folk rock with a «psychedelic» interlude in the shape of a carousel waltz; ʽMaroonedʼ, another instrumental excuse for an extended Gilmour solo that could have been taken right from the outtakes of his first solo album; ʽA Great Day For Freedomʼ, an ironic anthem whose musical pomp makes it sound like a special coda for The Wall directly commissioned from the likes of Asia (Gilmour even sounds a bit like John Wetton here); ʽWearing The Inside Outʼ, a bona fide adult contemporary number sung by Rick Wright but featuring no interesting keyboard work from him whatsoever; ʽTake It Backʼ, a very strange attempt by the band to go all utterly U2 on our asses — I mean, Gilmour did invent The Edgeʼs style of playing, but did he actually have to adapt it back, and try to sing like Bono at the same time?... and oh God no, there are still three more songs here before ʽHigh Hopesʼ, and I have already exceeded my limits on these mini-assessments.

Arguably the main weakness of all these songs is that they all go on for way too long, but thatʼs Pink Floyd to you: you know it donʼt work if it donʼt have an epic or atmospheric intro, and a solid Gilmour solo, and these things take time. But another weakness is the production — even if it is cleansed of the usual Eighties excesses, most of the album still sounds surprisingly lifeless, to the extent that even the live renditions of these tunes on Pulse are somewhat preferable to their studio counterparts. Gilmourʼs guitar tones are thin, and the melodicity is often lost in the dense forest of keyboard overdubs and echo effects. Even something as forgettable by itself as ʽComing Back To Lifeʼ actually does come back to life for a brief while during the live performance at Daveʼs Pompeii concert in 2016, with sharper and crisper guitar tones, louder and prouder vocals, and a band that seems way more willing to get into it than the session musicians were in 1994. It is almost as if Gilmour gave everybody a warning — "listen, guys, we are making this brooding melancholic album about how everything sucks, you are not allowed to bring any emotional sharpness or power into the proceedings".

ʽHigh Hopesʼ is a different story, though. It isnʼt nearly as killer as ʽSorrowʼ, simply because it delivers a smoother, compromising message — but it does feature the albumʼs most (if not only) memorable chorus, it does contain its most beautiful slide solo, and it does deliver its general message more efficiently in seven minutes than the rest of the album does in one hour. In the lyrical department, I admit that it can make one uneasy to sing along with lines like "the grass was greener, the light was brighter", even while fully grasping their irony — but one should not also overlook the titular line of "the ringing of the division bell had begun", which, in the context of the song, certainly referred to Sixtiesʼ counter-culture, but in these days could just as easily ring true with the social and generational rifts of the 21st century. I am not a big fan of the main piano-led melody — its chords are more post-peak Camel than Floyd in nature — but boy does David ever shine on that solo outro, maybe his best since ʽComfortably Numbʼ, though, once again, he does an even sharper and shriller job on subsequent live performances.

In any case, I think that at the very least, The Division Bell does good as a proper swan song for Floyd — who knows, maybe it would have earned a little more respect had Gilmour, Wright, and Mason expressly stated at the time that there would be no more Pink Floyd after this release, instead of leaving everybody hanging on in obscurity and letting things just go their natural way. It is definitely no Abbey Road, an album that managed to nicely sum up things while at the same way pointing several distinct paths to musical future; but neither is it an Itʼs Hard, an album that had to fake creativity and enthusiasm where there was none in sight. It is a record that honestly says it — we are tired and weary, we are through, we have no perspective on the future, we are only inspired by our past, and we are not ashamed of it. No wonder that the message was ignored or ridiculed back in 1994 — but as you look back on it from 2020, it is actually hard not to get some respect for this position.

Pink Floyd: Delicate Sound Of Thunder

PINK FLOYD: DELICATE SOUND OF THUNDER (1988)

1) Shine On You Crazy Diamond; 2) Learning To Fly; 3) Yet Another Movie; 4) Round And Around; 5) Sorrow; 6) The Dogs Of War; 7) On The Turning Away; 8) One Of These Days; 9) Time; 10) Wish You Were Here; 11) Us And Them; 12) Money; 13) Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2; 14) Comfortably Numb; 15) Run Like Hell.

General verdict: Passable live album — great songs, bad decisions, questionable atmosphere.

I certainly cannot be sure, but I think there must have been an uneasy vibe about Dave Floyd's 1987-89 tour in support of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. Not only because it was their first tour in seven years, but also because without Roger they had to make a fresh start — with Gilmour, Wright, and Mason now having to take upon themselves all the creative, visual, choreo­graphic, presentational decisions, and managing to stay true to the Floyd spirit as well as take into account the (not so precious) popular tastes of the mid-to-late Eighties.

Ironically, at their peak Pink Floyd did not even bother to think about live albums — or, if they did, nobody ever pushed strong enough to make it come true. Arguably the main reason behind this was that a Pink Floyd live show had to be seen, not heard: and, indeed, Delicate Sound Of Thunder was both recorded and filmed, although, unlike the album, the film has long since been out of print. But it may also be true that, at their peak, the band simply regarded the perspective of a live album as an excess, a sign of artistic weakness — and so, Delicate Sound Of Thunder may have easily become a nice weapon in the hands of Gilmour detractors. Like, what is the point of releasing (inferior) versions of classics like ʽMoneyʼ or ʽComfortably Numbʼ, if not to simply re-establish your claim on them, showing the world that the current lineup of Pink Floyd is the true, genuine item even without its primary creative driver?

It may have been just like that, yes. But in retrospect, Delicate Sound Of Thunder stands out as Floyd's (including Gilmour solo) weakest live album not because it had some inferior-ulterior motives behind its production, but because of two other things: an unbalanced and rather banal setlist, and an inability to think of any great ways to rejuvenate and re-embellish their legacy. This new Floyd was clearly still getting its bearings, and perhaps the late Eighties were not the best time for getting them.

The setlist is particularly telling. After a nice opening teaser with the first part of ʽShine Onʼ (probably the single best performance on the album, largely because it stays true to the original without any serious changes in tones or arrangements), the first part is essentially a complete re-run of Momentary Lapse, while the second part is a crudely put together mix of Big Classic Hits and nothing else. The implied feeling is clear: "If you are patient enough to sit through all of our new shit, we will be nice and play ʽTimeʼ and ʽMoneyʼ and ʽwe don't need no educationʼ for you, because this is what you came for, is it not?" And while they were all perfectly in their own right to adopt this attitude, we are perfectly in our own right to say that, because of this, Delicate Sound Of Thunder at times feels stiff, at times unsecure, at times give-the-people-what-they-want-ish: not the kind of record that you make when you have to prove the usefulness and relevance of your continued existence.

I would be perfectly willing to forget them all the theoretical transgressions if the Big Classic Hits were played well, but I have at least three unsurmountable problems here. Number one: what the hell are they doing with ʽMoneyʼ — who was the genius that told David to include a lax, slippery reggae section in the middle? Number two: what's up with the «experimental» twiddling of the guitar solo in ʽTimeʼ, replacing the harmonically perfect flow of the original with poorly improvised ugliness? Number three: is there anybody out there who actually likes what they did with the lead vocals on the verses to ʽComfortably Numbʼ? That part is not supposed to be a duet, and it is not supposed to be sung in that particular key: it is a doctor speaking to his patient, not a drowning sinner calling from the deep.

These are just some of the most glaring examples of things that went wrong here — things that, admittedly, would all be corrected by the time of the next tour, but since Pink Floyd concerts are not like Who concerts or even like Fleetwood Mac concerts and the songs generally stay the same, it makes misguided decisions such as the ones taken on this album stand out in a particu­larly unfavorable light. Most likely, there will rarely be a time when you are going to be in the mood for a live Floyd album, but once that time does arrive, the probability that you will pull out Delicate Sound Of Thunder instead of Pulse or the archival Wall Live seems quite low to me. Pulse, in particular, obliterates the need for Thunder completely — it has all the Big Classic Hits in superior versions, removes some of the biggest Lapse Of Reason stinkers like ʽDogs Of Warʼ, and generally feels more cohesive and purposeful.

Of course, one cannot take away the historical importance: visually, «live Pink Floyd» is almost certainly going to be the 1987–1995 Pink Floyd, since the band never liked filming their shows in the classic days — and the record does introduce the by-now familiar extended Floyd lineup, with regulars such as Guy Pratt on bass, Tim Renwick on second guitar, and Jon Carin on additional keyboards (the guy who went on to play with both Gilmour and Waters). Plus, on the whole the album is certainly listenable: Gilmour will have to be totally disintegrated before he can do a bad ʽComfortably Numbʼ solo (he does quite intentionally botch the one on ʽTimeʼ, as I said), and there was never a time when Wright did not sound adorable and cathartic when singing on ʽUs And Themʼ. It's just that the only reason to listen to it may have been when you were faced with the uneasy choice of paying top dollar for a brand new blinking copy of Pulse or fishing out a used copy of Thunder from the two-dollar bin. And now, in this brand new streaming age, you might never be faced with such a choice again.

Pink Floyd: A Momentary Lapse Of Reason

PINK FLOYD: A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON (1987)

1) Signs Of Life; 2) Learning To Fly; 3) The Dogs Of War; 4) One Slip; 5) On The Turning Away; 6) Yet Another Movie; 7) A New Machine, Pt. 1; 8) Terminal Frost; 9) A New Machine, Pt. 2; 10) Sorrow.

General verdict: Curiously, «Dave Floyd» gets better with age. Moral lesson: if you cannot write interesting songs, save up your despair and just smoke 'em in it.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I am about as old now myself as David was when he agreed that his next solo album could and should be marketed as a «Pink Floyd» product — but, curiously, I no longer feel those feelings of disgust and disappointment, listening to A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, as I did nearly twenty years ago, nor can I share the feelings etched in Web-stone by fellow reviewers around that time. It is not a matter of slapping generic qualitative labels like ʽgoodʼ or ʽgreatʼ onto the product — it is more a matter of intentionally or unintentionally alienating yourself from the material, depending on which particular side of it gets particularly clearly exposed to you at a given period in your life... well, you know.

I am fairly sure that, had the record been credited to David Gilmour rather than «Pink Floyd», our reaction would never have been that brutal. Even on a purely formal level, this is not Pink Floyd: Nick Mason, who had been seriously out of practice by 1987, is largely responsible here for sound effects rather than drumming — and although the recording process did result in Rick Wright returning to his old band, he is only present here on a few tracks and was not even listed as a band member in the original credits (though this was more of a legal thing). In place of Nick and Rick, there are about 18 different session musicians — drummers, keyboardists, brass players, back vocalists — helping Gilmour out, much as it happened on About Face, although the personnel is largely different. From this point of view, this is about as «Pink Floyd» as Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio is «The Beatles».

But at the same time, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason is also decidedly different in tone and style from About Face. The latter was a collection of sometimes atmospheric, sometimes embar­rassing pop songs; the former is a cohesive suite of grim, tense, sonically ambitious compositions that clearly strives to earn its labeling as Pink Floyd — regardless of whether one thinks that it does or does not achieve that goal. If anything, Gilmour went slightly over the top here, putting together the most depressingly depressed record so far in Floyd history: bleak and hopeless through and through, Lapse Of Reason is the perfect soundtrack for your average nuclear survivor, emerging from his bunker twenty years after the rest of humanity has burned away and investigating all the rubble and ashes. Play it back-to-back with Radio K.A.O.S., released the same year, and Roger's bitter, sarcastic, venomous vision of human nature will seem like Stevie Wonder in comparison. No signs of any turning tides on here, for sure. (With the exception of ʽOn The Turning Awayʼ, but even that is not a very hopeful song).

Just because the conceptual nature of the record is so clear, I would never stoop to accusing Gilmour of simply releasing the album «for the money» — it is an artistic statement, and one that is essentially true to the legacy and backstory of Pink Floyd as a band. The problems lie mainly in the spheres of songwriting and execution: Dave is a cool human being and a great guitarist, but he is not a master of thrills and hooks, he does not possess the natural eccentricity and turbulence of Waters, and, quite significantly, he does not have immunity to the sonic diseases characterizing the Eighties (although, to be fair, that flaw he shares in common with his former bandmate). All of this seriously hurts the album — a situation made even worse by the fact that most people already feel biased against a Waters-less record that dares to call itself «Pink Floyd».

It does not help that the opening instrumental almost sounds like a weak parody on the opening part of ʽShine On You Crazy Diamondʼ — same weepy blues guitar ringing against kaleidoscopic keyboards, except that the guitar licks are nowhere near as expressive and memorable, and the keyboards are simplistically glued into sticky sonic muck, rather than into sparkling, scattering diamonds; and the symbolism of the opening sound effect of oars lazily rowing across some unspecified water basin is most probably lost on the listener anyway, even if it was there in the first place. Calling this uninspired New-Age-blues piece ʽSigns Of Lifeʼ should have taken a prize in the category of «unintentional self-irony».

But it does get better. ʽLearning To Flyʼ reflects one of Gilmour's better ideas of the decade — turning his passion for flight into a metaphor for searching for a new beginning; and although there is little to recommend the song for other than its vocal melody, it should be sufficient — the optimistic buildup, the heartfelt tone, even the lyrics that get the point across so well, and yet, at the same time, a certain melancholic air implicitly felt in the chords and in the quiet, prayer-like vocal performance. It is the most cheerful song on the album, yet it is only cheerful enough to suggest an escapist way of thinking — and even that, not for too long.

After ʽLearning To Flyʼ, which seems to have survived as the only favorite of the average picky fan on this record, the territory becomes very tricky. ʽThe Dogs Of Warʼ is a typical target for criticism — its title and some of its sonic tactics are reminiscent of Animals, but the song is really just a generic slow blues-rock number, clumsily disguised as art-rock with its synth bass, keyboard explosions, generally icy production, and doom-laden atmosphere. Its lyrics are more Geezer Butler than Roger Waters ("they will take and you will give / and you must die so that they may live" is as straightforward as it comes), and its angry pathos just does not seem to come naturally to Gilmour — the man seems to be more a fan of the merciless hand of fate than of the criminal wrongdoings of evil puppeteers, and the song is more of a consciously preoccupied effort to out-Roger Roger than to follow one's own muse.

But if ʽDogs Of Warʼ is largely irredeemable, I now find it easier to tolerate and warm up to other wannabe-epic numbers such as ʽOn The Turning Awayʼ and ʽYet Another Movieʼ. Not because they are great compositions — I think that there are thousands of arena-rock exercises from the decade that are equally comparable to them and forgettable in terms of melody — but because there is something grimly seductive about their dark, grimy, ashy production, on top of which you get Gilmour's always-intelligently-moving singing and guitar playing. No excuse, however, for the lite jazz of ʽTerminal Frostʼ, with bland-as-heck sax noodling and an elevator-ish keyboard riff twirling it on the spot, or for its intro-outro parts in which Gilmour tries to give voice to his ʽNew Machineʼ; all I can say is that it would be awesome to see a true AI synthesizing its own R&B manner of singing, but it is pretty ugly to have a human being doing this work for it.

All said, though, I insist that the album goes out with a bang. Just as ʽLearning To Flyʼ gave it a great start, ʽSorrowʼ gives it an even more haunting finale. Again, it might be easier to appreciate the song in live performance — check out, for instance, the version from the 2016 Pompeii con­cert, finally liberated from its silly, dated, metronomic Casio keyboard backbone — but even in its original incarnation, ʽSorrowʼ was the blackest, the dreariest finale to a Floyd record so far (and I am not sure that Gilmour managed to top it with ʽHigh Hopesʼ, which would be much more gentle and lyrical). I could easily live without its ghostly "one world, one soul" chorus, but the relentlessly grim, merciless verse flow, totally uncompromising, shutting out any chances at a single ray of light, is at least worthy of artistic respect.

Ultimately, I think that the album's poor artistic reputation has to be remedied. It is nowhere near Floyd's classic run, yet it is more of a result of reasonably graceful artistic aging than a total fuckin' disaster, let alone a «sellout», as it has been frequently branded. You do have to be a very big admirer of David's voice, words, and guitar in general to forgive A Momentary Lapse Of Reason all of its numerous sins — many of which were simply the side effect of time and circum­stances, though relative lack of creative songwriting can hardly be excused at any time. But it is more memorable and meaningful than any of Dave's preceding solo albums, and I guess the same should go for Roger's, too. And all those hospital beds on the beach were a great touch as well — come to think of it, this might be the most intimidating that Storm Thorgerson ever got with a Pink Floyd album cover.

Pink Floyd: The Final Cut

PINK FLOYD: THE FINAL CUT (1983)

1) The Post War Dream; 2) Your Possible Pasts; 3) One Of The Few; 4) The Hero's Return; 5) The Gunners Dream; 6) Paranoid Eyes; 7) Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert; 8) The Fletcher Memorial Home; 9) Southampton Dock; 10) The Final Cut; 11) Not Now John; 12) Two Suns In The Sunset.

General verdict: For those who much prefer Pink Floyd as activists to Pink Floyd as musicians — or for those who want to hear more of The Wall, only worse.

And here comes the big split: the album that not only tore apart Pink Floyd itself, but also the fans, some of whom love the record to death and tear into its enemies like Maggie tore into Galtieri — and some of whom simply refuse to recognize this as a Pink Floyd album, good or bad. Indeed, even though both Animals and The Wall were conceptualized by Waters exclusive­ly, they still sound like Floyd albums: cosmic keyboards, blazing guitars, mind-blowing sound effects, tons of different stuff going on — Waters may be the conductor, but the Pink Floyd Symphony Orchestra is no slouch on its own, either. With The Final Cut, this is no longer even «Roger Waters & Pink Floyd»; this is a bona fide Roger Waters solo album, with special guest stars Michael Kamen on keyboards and orchestration, Raphael Ravenscroft on sax, Andy Bown on organ, Ray Cooper on percussion... oh, yes, and also David Gilmour on guitars and Nick Mason on drums, almost forgot to mention.

It is not entirely true that music and politics should not mix; there is no unwritten law like that, and in fact, there is no prohibition against music mixing with anything — as long as the balance between music and non-music is kept in check. Such is not the case with The Final Cut, a very rushed project that Waters hastened to complete in the wake of the Falklands War, while the memory of the conflict was still fresh in everybody's mind. For the first time in Floyd history, lyrics and direct political message took vast precedence over the musical structure of the songs: in fact, Roger cared so little about the tunes that he made use of several outtakes originally written for The Wall and wrote new (or modified old) lyrics for them (instead of the original plan to release them as outtakes under the working title Spare Bricks). As for Gilmour, by all accounts he never thought much of the project from the start, but lacked the energy to battle Roger on this, and essentially took up the position of a grumbly session player.

It is no surprise, then, that usually one's reaction towards The Final Cut very much depends on how much one sympathizes with Roger Waters, his social views, and his ability to express them. The music, predictably, mostly sounds like an inferior, much less catchy and much less energetic sequel to The Wall — very similar sonic textures, very similar use of sound effects, very similar alternations between loud and quiet, and even a very similar lyrical protagonist, except that this time around the hatred and the venom are targeted at the powers-that-be rather than parents, teachers, girlfriends, and showbiz executives. And this, really, is the only thing that can elevate the album above average: is there enough rage, enough passion, enough intelligence to transform the mediocre melodies into something greater?

For starters, this review is not going to be transformed in a discussion of Roger's leftist politics — honestly, I do not care if your name is Roger Waters or Ted Nugent as long as you have that genuine fire burning inside of you and the ability to chuck some of those embers in the final mix. The album's provisional title, Requiem For A Post-War Dream, is clever enough, I guess, and Roger's concerns about all those idealistic plans and purposes for the planet, for which our forefathers died in the war, going to waste in the wake of neoconservatism and nationalism and jingoism once again on the rise are certainly justified (and clearly even more justified in our modern age). That's OK, as far as poetry goes, I am not going to rail against questions like "what happened to the post-war dream?" or utopian visions like ʽThe Gunners Dreamʼ or the recurring presence of the ghost of Hamlet's, uh, I mean, Roger's father.

What I am going to rail against is the idea of one of the greatest, most proverbially perfectionist bands in the world going almost insultingly lazy on our asses — and, after an incredible decade-long run of constant creativity, innovation, and diligent work, suddenly deciding that now is the time to rest on those laurels and recycle old ideas. Be it the quiet organ hum, the low, tense, spiteful vocal whisper, the scratchy-delayed rhythm guitar run, the heavenly frequencies of the synthesizer, the macho arena-rock pump, we have heard it all — and in much better quality — on The Wall; for almost each song on here, you can find its earlier prototype on that album, and I am not even going to name any examples (they have all been named numerous times in profes­sional and amateurish accounts of the album alike). With The Final Cut, the awesome evolution of the Pink Floyd sound, stretching all the way from the early Barrett years to the monumentality of The Wall, comes to a close — not so much because the members of Pink Floyd have lost the capacity for evolving as because they simply lost interest in evolving.

I am not saying that Waters and Gilmour should have obligatorily be inspired by all the New Wave achievements: The Wall pretty much managed to close its eyes on almost everything that was happening around and still become an artistic and commercial success. But The Wall still gave us a band that was constantly looking for new sounds, new textures, new ways to exploit and manipulate your mind. The focus of The Final Cut, in comparison, is to give you a clear, well-defined social viewpoint, resting entirely on old pieces of musical software. This is the big difference between this album and Animals, where the message was less overtly determined by current events and delivered primarily through the music — one can easily disagree with Roger's tripartite dogs-pigs-sheep scheme, but one cannot disagree with the obvious fact that most of that album actually consisted of instrumental tracks. The Final Cut, however, is unimaginable without the vocals — it is essentially political poetry set to Wall-style music.

This is not to say that I actively hate the record while it is on. I like the good old intensity of Roger's voice, that snake-like hiss of his fricatives and the subtle menace in his high vowels that you can never mistake with any other singer's. I like Gilmour's guitar tone on ʽYour Possible Pastsʼ and all those other songs where he contributes solos that are at least not any worse than the ones he concocted on his own solo albums. I like ʽThe Gunners Dreamʼ, whose piano chords and epic vocals make it sound like solo John Lennon (although it may not be a completely healthy sign when a Pink Floyd tune begins to sound like solo John Lennon). I am not even enraged when we get down to ʽNot Now Johnʼ, the song that typically alienates fans because of its arena-rock monster riffs and needless screaming — we are not, after all, supposed to believe that Floyd could ever take the bombastic arena approach of Queen so seriously as to want to imitate it without any signs of irony (of which this song has plenty).

But the end result is still dull. It is as if with The Wall, Roger really succeeded in pulling out all of his worst nightmares and finding the perfect musical ways to convey them to other people; but with The Final Cut, he simply was not able to reach the same psychological depths when shifting focus from deeply personal imprints to the overall situation in the world at large. If The Wall was essentially an album about himself (and he did that part pretty damn good), then The Final Cut is more of an album about his father, and about all those other war veterans («is this what we were saving this world for?»), and, perhaps because Roger Waters is not his own father and not a war veteran, the entire effort comes across as misguided. I know that there are people who were, and continue to be, deeply moved by the message here, but there is a damn good reason why the entire Floyd stretch from Dark Side to The Wall continues to receive universal acclaim, while The Final Cut is kind of stuck in limbo — and that reason, in my opinion, is not even the lack of musical progress as it is this whiff of fakery.

We will even omit the fact that, probably, not all British veterans of WWII were disgusted with the UK's involvement in the Falklands War (I'd be highly surprised if they were). We will simply say that Roger Waters is great when he is playing himself; but when he tries to play somebody else, he comes across as unconvincing — and this does not have anything to do with whether you agree with his points or not (I, for instance, agree with quite a few, though I probably would not take such a definitively one-sided stance, had I been in this man's shoes in 1982 instead of minding my own business and not even giving a damn about Brezhnev's funeral). An alternate option, of course, is to insist that The Wall was childish (puerile? infantile?) and inane while The Final Cut is mature and insightful, and that Roger's fits and pangs of self-pity and self-hatred are so ego-driven and laughable that it is a relief to finally see him turn away from his own problems and look at humanity at large. To this I can only reply that you should always do whatever it is you are good at doing, and that I will take an effective, musically well-engineered bout of self-pity over a derivative, half-assed sermon on the fate of humanity as long as humanity is still alive and kicking.

As far as I'm concerned, The Final Cut is the final cut — the one album that showed the world that Pink Floyd had become a dysfunctional entity, completing the evolution of Roger Waters from a cosmic dreamer and sonic experimentator into a second-rate singer-song­writer, and the evolution of David Gilmour from the revered guru of psycho-blues into a dispassionate sidekick for a second-rate singer-songwriter. Oh Maggie, Maggie, what have you done... to this band? Was it for this that Daddy died?

Pink Floyd: The Wall

PINK FLOYD: THE WALL (1979)

1) In The Flesh?; 2) The Thin Ice; 3) Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 1; 4) The Happiest Days Of Our Lives; 5) Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2; 6) Mother; 7) Goodbye Blue Sky; 8) Empty Spaces; 9) Young Lust; 10) One Of My Turns; 11) Don't Leave Me Now; 12) Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 3; 13) Hey You; 14) Is There Anybody Out There?; 15) Nobody Home; 16) Vera; 17) Bring The Boys Back Home; 18) Comfortably Numb; 19) The Show Must Go On; 20) In The Flesh; 21) Run Like Hell; 22) Waiting For The Worms; 23) Stop!; 24) The Trial; 25) Outside The Wall.

General verdict: Still the best album about alienation ever written.

Is there life behind The Wall after 30? Back in 1979, the album became the personal Bible of many a frustrated adolescent — certainly its theme of alienation hit closer to home than some­thing far more symbolic and far less realistic as Tommy a decade prior to that. But as time went by and those same young people began to grow up, overcome their crises, broaden their scopes, and expand their horizons, more and more of them grew more dismissive and skeptical about the simple hooks, cheap tricks, exaggerated hyperboles, and emotional manipulation that lies at the heart of the album. More and more you would encounter accounts of the «...yes, I used to be a big fan, but fortunately, I grew out of it and moved on to more serious things...» variety — in fact, although I certainly cannot confirm it statistically, I do believe that The Wall only stands second to Jim Morrison in that respect.

In reality, The Wall suffers from all the typical problems of a pop record that dares to make a strong, concise, and mass-accessible artistic statement. Like any Waters-led album, it takes itself very seriously, while failing, at the same time, to explore its artistic and philosophical themes with the kind of depth one would expect from the likes of any «classic of alienation», be it Schopenhauer or Herman Hesse or even Leonard Cohen. It was a record made for mass appeal, even despite Waters' alleged despisal of the masses; its frequent use of contemporary arena-rock clichés and, occasionally, even disco tropes emphasizes that appeal, and its self-loathing, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, self-humbling lyrics make it easy for people to equate themselves with the protagonist. (We don't need no education? We don't need no thought control? Now you're talking my language, mate!) Overall, when it comes to musical story-writing, Roger Waters is no Peter Hammill, Lou Reed, or David Bowie — although, granted, when Roger Waters intentionally tries to be sophisticated and modernist, the results can be even more embarrassing (there is a good reason, after all, why the rest of the band, when facing a choice between The Wall and The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking, never wavered before settling on the former).

Nevertheless, not everything in this life necessarily has to be ultra-complicated and multi-layered in order to be true — and a large part of why The Wall succeeds has to do with Waters making it autobiographical, sometimes to the point of mild disturbance. His own family history, his school experience, his colleagues, his women, his audiences are all partially reflected in the tale of The Wall, but the main underlying message is that of misanthropy. There are no positive characters in The Wall whatsoever — even Pink's own mother is an abomination — and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this more or less reflects Roger's own stance in this world. The Wall was an album that he must have loved making, regurgitating every single drop of hatred he had stocked up in his organism, and since the most important thing about art is passion, not intellect, it is hard not to admire the passion-for-hatred that populates every single song here, regardless of your own personal feelings towards Waters or towards humanity.

Additionally, one must not forget about the second most important person in the making of The Wall: not Gilmour, and certainly not Wright (who showed very little interest in working on the album anyway, and was eventually fired for lack of commitment), but Bob Ezrin, the mastermind behind all of Alice Cooper's albums from 1971 to 1977. It is Ezrin's touch, largely, that is respon­sible for The Wall featuring a far more «nightmarish» sound than anything Pink Floyd did up to that date — and a lot of the album's theatricality, all the way down to the Gilbert & Sullivan pastiches at the end, would have been unimaginable without Ezrin. This is usually served as another argu­ment against the album: namely, that Ezrin's participation had dragged Pink Floyd, one of the most serious and intellectual bands of their time, down to the level of Alice Cooper's macabre extravaganzas. However, for one thing, Alice Cooper's macabre extravaganzas were usually far more intelligent and intriguing than most people are willing to admit; and for another thing, sometimes a point is far more effectively driven home when it dons a black cape with a red lining, a top hat, and a pair of fangs hanging over its lower lip. Not always. But sometimes.

Then there are the simple defensive arguments — namely, that The Wall (and particularly its first half; the second half starts repeating itself too much) has lots of great songs. Short, concise, catchy, emotional, whatever, and they all make sense. Certainly, the decision to make ʽAnother Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2ʼ into a disco song was commercially calculated — but it is hardly a coincidence that the disco elements, coming from a mind-numbing genre that the band loathed, are used in a song that subtly protests against mind-numbing treatment of children in the stiffly conservative educational system. (It is too bad that when the movie came out, the association between stiff teachers, brainwashed adolescents, meat grinders, and robotic dance muzak never truly became a part of the public conscience). Likewise, the thick, meaty, testosterony, macho-masculine big riffs of ʽIn The Fleshʼ and ʽYoung Lustʼ are perfectly justified in their ironic deconstruction of the arena-rock stereotypes: Pink, by his very nature, is anything but a macho guy, but the nature of the game forces him into certain stereotypes, just as it forces Pink Floyd to slip into uncomfortable musical clothes to reflect this.

And all the neat production touches, too. An album cannot be bad if every single time that I listen to it, no matter how many years have passed, every single time I do a bit of a jump at the eighteenth second, when the quiet concertina melody of ʽOutside The Wallʼ is knocked into oblivion by the big opening chord of ʽIn The Flesh?ʼ I mean, I know it's coming on, but unless I make an effort to concentrate really hard and watch the timer, that jump is inevitable — a psycho­logical move that puts you on your toes from the very beginning and literally forces you into watching your step all the way. Or the way the quiet wing-flapping, sky-crossing, grim-sounding delayed rhythms of ʽAnother Brick In The Wall, Pt. 1ʼ grow out of the arena-rock conclusion to ʽThe Thin Iceʼ? Those sounds are suspense incarnate — a foreboding of something terrible about to happen, a dark omen that can be visualized in the form of some seriously inauspicious bird formation up in the sky, with Pink's daddy as the leader of the pack.

And all the diversity, by the way: in addition to meaty arena-rock and four-on-the-floor disco beats, we have just about everything else — occasional returns to Floyd's pastoral acoustic past (ʽGoodbye Blue Skyʼ, now ten times darker and gloomier than it used to be); industrial night­mares that make ʽWelcome To The Machineʼ look like a tourist visit (ʽEmpty Spacesʼ); retro-fashioned vaudeville (everything that has to do with Vera Lynn); military marches (ʽBring The Boys Back Homeʼ, unsurprisingly given over to the Military Orchestra of the Soviet Army when Roger would later resurrect The Wall in Berlin); and, of course, the above-mentioned Gilbert & Sullivan bits in ʽThe Trialʼ. For all my love for Tommy, it's got nothing on this sonic panorama in terms of bringing out the different moods through a smorgasbord of musical styles.

I have always maintained, and continue to maintain, that The Wall seems to run out of inspi­ration toward the end — that its first half, dealing with the construction of the wall, is so much sharper and deadlier than the second half, dealing with living behind the wall and ultimately tearing the wall down. The Hitler thing that Roger came up with for the second half is frankly silly (the Führer's name should not be taken in vain every time you need an evil analogy for your protagonist, you know), and the concept kind of sags, if not directly crumbles, by the time of Pink's imaginary «trial» and the final verdict — if only because it is very clear that The Wall, once constructed, cannot be torn down by any single decree. At most, it can be torn down tempo­rarily, only to be quickly rebuilt again from scratch — which, I guess, is precisely the symbolic point of the looped ending, in which ʽOutside The Wallʼ both ends and begins the album. Many people probably mistook the record for featuring a happy ending of sorts — a perspective that would certainly be reinforced by the Berlin shows a decade later — but it is conceptually quite clear that the destruction of the wall brings neither redemption nor peace of mind to the prota­gonist; rather, it leaves him in the position of a snail without a shell, a scared, shivering, whim­pering little being, whose state of mind perfectly corresponds to the quiet wimpy concertina and clarinet duet at the end of the record. But I have never found this to be a satisfying ending, for some reason; the entire «From Nüremberg Rally to Nüremberg Trial» line of the second half, once it abandons the true-to-life storyline of Roger ʽPinkʼ Waters' biography and dips into pure symbolism and Lewis Carroll analogies, loses sharp focus and becomes almost self-parodic.

I think that if I had my way around this, I'd probably end the album with ʽComfortably Numbʼ. This is the song that should bring Pink's fate to a close: what better conclusion than to simply admit that "I have become comfortably numb", and leave it at that? The chorus of the song, along with Gilmour's first solo, offers a glimpse of redemption — a blissful, Platonic vision of paradise that, for one brief moment, returns the hero to the happiest moments of his early childhood — but the verses, and, of course, particularly the bleak-o'-the-bleakest closing solo shut out that possi­bility for good, and bring down the Hammer of the Gods. It is amusing, I think, that in most of the polls on greatest guitar solos it is usually ʽStairway To Heavenʼ and ʽComfortably Numbʼ that battle for the top spot — where the former, the way I see it, represents Eternal Salvation, and the latter is a clear-cut contender for Eternal Damnation (brilliantly captured in the movie, by the way, where the guitar solo is accompanying Geldof-Pink as he is being dragged by two security devils through the dark corridors to Hell — the rock stadium).

However, if I were to try and redeem the serious, immortal value of the album through one single song, I would have made an unusual choice — as great as ʽComfortably Numbʼ is (and, might I add, in subsequent live performances Gilmour managed to make it even greater: the single best version of the song I have ever seen or heard was from his recent return to Pompeii in 2016), the single most touching and deepest moment, I believe, can be found in ʽDon't Leave Me Nowʼ. This is where, according to the storyline, Pink has his first soul-baring breakdown, and while the lyrics simply try to put a new twist on an old cliché (the lowdown wife-beating husband confes­sing how much he really depends on his wife for survival), the transition from the last "why are you running away?" into the moody, drawn-out, quietly wailing coda of "oh babe, babe..." is the one that, as they say, «gets me in the feels» every time. That single, simple moment of several prolonged and sustained guitar notes and vocal harmonies is the single, simple moment when Pink Floyd came the closest to embody that "dull, aching pain" from which there can be no escape and no remedy if it ever gets to you. If, for some reason, you have not been paying enough attention to that bit, and have eluded getting caught up in it, try to go on as if nothing happened — there were a couple of moments in my own life when I happened to listen to it in the wrong mood, and although I will not confess to wanting to cut my wrists or anything, well, there were some nasty consequences anyway.

With all this and more, I think the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this review becomes more or less self-evident. The Wall is a great album — a solid concept that has not been realized to the utmost perfection, remaining as flawed as its protagonist, but for the most part, running upon utterly sincere and profound inspiration, and, at its best, combining brilliant musical, technological, and theatrical ideas in a way that no other Pink Floyd album does. Parts of it, in fact, become more obviously awesome as time goes by — ʽDon't Leave Me Nowʼ, in parti­cular, I'd say, is more naturally appreciated after 30 than before, though, clearly, I would not ever say the same about "we don't need no education". Whatever be the complications, The Wall is a singular achievement in rock history — and, while we're at it, it should probably also be noted that it was a timeless achievement from the very start, having come out at the height of the New Wave era, yet released by a pack of old fogeys from the age of psychedelic and progressive rock: who else at that time had managed to beat the odds in a similar manner?

Pink Floyd: Animals

PINK FLOYD: ANIMALS (1977)

1) Pigs On The Wing 1; 2) Dogs; 3) Pigs (Three Different Ones); 4) Sheep; 5) Pigs On The Wing 2.

General verdict: An ideal three-part musical crash course in how to hate, despise, and alienate all types of people — should be an obligatory part of your high school curriculum.

Somewhere in between 1975 and 1977, Pink Floyd, formerly a democratic conglomeration of different, but compatible minds, evolved in the direction of a one-man band. In the long run, this would turn out to be the beginning of the end: one-man bands have an unfortunate tendency to either stagnate in the slower-and-slower-flowing channel of the one man's brain (Jethro Tull is the most classic example here), or to heat up and explode if the other members begin resenting their submissiveness — Floyd chose the second route, although, curiously, it took Waters and Gilmour almost a decade to openly declare war on each other.

In the short run, however, no matter how many useless accusations of dictatorial assholishness one might fling at Roger, assuming full control within the band gave him the chance to express himself, for a brief while, with such power and clarity that everything the band released prior to Animals would look like a happy walk in the clouds by comparison. While Gilmour and Wright, both of whom probably had a better ear for melody and a better understanding of sheer sonic beauty than Waters, seemed to languish in relative passiveness, Waters' activity only grew in the Seventies from album to album — a negative-tinged activity, sprouting from his personal, seemingly unfriendly and unstable, character, and seriously fueled by outside circumstances; to the point that, by late 1976, it is safe to state that Roger Waters, the «dinosaur art-rocker» by contemporary standards, was more frustrated, spiteful, vengeful, and misanthropic than the punkiest of all punk bands in existence, and he did not need no chainsaw buzz to make that known to humanity.

Already on Wish You Were Here, we saw the first signs of what would soon become a full-fledged hatred for (nearly) all humanity, albeit still seriously tempered with such «purer» feelings as deep sorrow and sincere empathy for those who are (were) not able to withhold the cruel pressure of this rotten world. But really, Floyd had yet to come out and do it — and it wouldn't be at all possible, had Waters not assumed complete control: Rick Wright, one of the gentlest and mellowest souls on Earth, would only have gotten in the way, and Gilmour, even if the man is perfectly capable of expressing anger and indignation in his work, never had even a dozenth dose of the asphyxiating, kill-on-the-spot bile that Mother Nature had synthesized in Waters' soul; amusingly, the more money they were making on their records, the denser and the bitterer was the poison, with Waters getting madder and madder at both the music business (and business in general) and the band's audiences who, he felt, were either not getting the message at all or would not be changed in any way upon getting the message.

But even if we think of all that accumulated anger as stupid, unhealthy, or hypocritical, one thing is for sure: anger — waves of uncontrollable, barely rational, overwhelming anger — is precisely the one thing that provided the band with a second (third?) breath, and helped them retain their creativity, vitality, and popularity in the New Wave era, when most of their peers either disbanded, or sold out in embarrassing ways, or retreated into niche markets. And so — thank you, Roger Waters, for being such an asshole.

As is usual with Floyd, the songs had a lengthy gestation period (ʻDogsʼ was previously played live for months as ʻYou Gotta Be Crazyʼ, and ʻSheepʼ as ʻRaving And Droolingʼ, widely available then and now on numerous live bootlegs), and the recording process itself took half a year (actually, not atypical for the band's usual level of perfectionism). No additional musicians or technical personnel were involved at all, except for Brian Humphries helping out with the engineering duties (and this gives the album a somewhat claustrophobic feel at times, compared to the more expansive soundscapes of their previous two masterpieces).

The story of the album as such is well-known — how several different ideas eventually coalesced in a loosely Orwellian concept album about three types of animals, and how the album sleeve photo was actually shot with a real floating pig in the air, and how the floating pig flew away and scared off all the cows on a farm in Kent (just another one of Waters' mean practical jokes on the world, oh yes) — but it should also be kept in mind that all these conceptual and packaging elements are quite secondary to the music, which merely takes Animal Farm as a formal framework and uses it for Roger's own purposes (in a way, perhaps, even darker purposes than Orwell's own).

Upon release, the album was not as commercially successful as its predecessors — not so much, it seems, due to essentially being a Waters ego trip (The Wall would be even more of an ego trip, and that did not prevent it from being a smash success), but rather because it was not accompanied by any singles, and the imposing length of the LP tracks made it way too «dinosaurish» for the public, already in the strong grip of the back-to-simplicity movement. Even so, it still rose to No. 2 in the UK and to No. 3 in the US: no mean feat for a record that shows so little love for humanity as a whole or individual humans in their own right.

One interesting consequence of the album's lapsing into a relative gap between such massive hit generators as Dark Side,  Wish You Were Here, and The Wall, though, was its acqusition of a certain cult status — for example, quite a few sophisti-prog fans who usually wrinkle their noses at hearing the sellout name of Pink Floyd are often willing to give Animals an extra chance precisely due to its «anti-commercial» flavor, and I can certainly understand them (at one point in life, it was my personal Floyd album, too, and even though I have also mellowed with age, I certainly do not hold it in any less respect than I did back when I thought it brave and cool to invent various reasons to «despise» Dark Side for its unabashed banality, etc.). Basically, this here is «hipster-targeted Floyd» rather than «mass-targeted Floyd», which does not automatically make one better than the other... it is simply fun to have both side by side.

One thing, and one thing only really matters on Animals: hatred. Yes, there is a very brief acoustic introduction that opens the album on a note of tenderness (in the style of ʻWish You Were Hereʼ), and an equally brief acoustic outro that closes it on the same note. But both of these bits feel like they have been tackled on at the very last moment — intentionally, perhaps, to provide more of a «mock-happy-ending» (and beginning) than any real positive effect, so short and frail they are when compared to the huge bleeding epics in between. For almost forty minutes, Animals breathes nothing but pure hatred, despisal, or contempt for all of its heroes, and since there are so many ways to hate, despise, and hold in contempt, the subject never becomes boring. And, of course, it is not just the lyrics, and not even the way they are delivered (although the vocals, most of them handled by Roger with minor exceptions, are vituperative throughout): most of that green fire is contained in the music, where Gilmour becomes Waters' unwilling accomplice, and only Rick Wright tries to hold his own ground, usually without success (the organ intro for ʻPigsʼ and the electric piano intro for ʻSheepʼ reflect Rick's usual introspective mournfulness, but both very quickly give way to Hell's fury).

The first two epics are those with which most of the listeners can easily find common ground, because, after all, the "dogs" and the "pigs" of this world are relatively scarce compared to its "sheep", and I'd imagine that not a lot of them frequently listen to Pink Floyd anyway. ʻDogsʼ takes a big gamble by occupying most of Side A, but it is also the most complex construction of the three — for some reason, out of all three classes, "dogs" hold Roger's interest for the longest period, as he examines the average dog's motivations, actions, and ultimate fate ("dragged down by the stone") over at least three very different musical sections. The basic task is simple — give a spine-chillin' musical account of the "dog eat dog" ideology — but the way it is accomplished is definitely not, as the song takes plenty of time to build up, evolve from fidgety-nervous folk-prog-rocker in the Canterbury style to a slow bluesy jam and then to an atmospheric, super-slow, keyboard-dominated mid-section, almost pedantically illustrating the actual process of being "dragged down by the stone". Gilmour shines the most on the slow blues jam (he uses more or less the same rhythmic base as in ʻShine On You Crazy Diamondʼ, but this time as a launchpad for vicious and violent, rather than solemn and mournful soloing, culminating in my personal favourite evil cackle bit around 6:20); Wright gets to show his skill on the «drowning» section, arguably their most openly psychedelic bit of music since ʻEchoesʼ; but ultimately, of course, it is all Roger's show, even when Gilmour is singing lead vocals. The "have a good drown / as you go down / all alone, dragged down by the stone" bit gets my personal vote for «most vicious musical bit of the year», just because it sounds so horrendously natural and deep-felt. (Ironic bit of trivia: the proverbial dog, at the end of the song, is described as "who was trained not to spit in the fan", which is precisely what Waters would do at the end of the band's ensuing tour, even if we are talking different sorts of fans here).

ʻPigs (Three Different Ones)ʼ is my personal favorite of the three, even if musically, it is the most simple and straightforward one, never really straining away too much from its funky base. The reason for this, I believe, is that it is on this track that the «hatred» motif reaches its apogee — the syncopated guitar chords slash away far more viciously than the furious, but harmless acoustic strum on ʻDogsʼ, Waters' vocals range from evil-grinning spiteful taunts on the verses to clenched-teeth aggressive insults in the chorus, and then, of course, there's the talkbox... simply put, ʻPigsʼ features the single best use of the talkbox effect in music history, if only because the talkbox naturally sounds like a pig, so what could be a possibly better place for it than on a song directed against all the allegorical pigs of this world? Musically, the single most chilling moment on the album is at 5:10, when, after a cleverly outstretched, carefully built-up suspenseful passage, Dave lets loose with a MONSTROUS talkbox grunt — as if, out of nowhere, a giant, smelly, bloodthirsty, 3000-pound-heavy pig landed right on your head and pummeled you six feet under the ground with all that weight. The overall feel of disgust and ugliness hangs so heavy above the entire track, you almost feel the need to take a shower once it's over. By the way, personally, I am not sure if poor Mary Whitehouse really belonged in the "pigs" category ("house proud town mouse" is a far more apt description), but apparently, Roger had to sweep all the ideological leaders into one foul heap, so a-gruntin' we'll all go. (It also helped immensely forty years later, when the song suddenly got a whole new life from Roger's anti-Trump campaign — and the line "hey you, Whitehouse!" effortlessly acquired a far more relevant meaning).

And then, of course, there is ʻSheepʼ, which should have earned Pink Floyd a death sentence, but apparently half of the fans never understood what it was about in the first place, and the other half thought it was about the first half, so everything turned out all right in the end. Musically, it is somewhat of a predecessor to ʻRun Like Hellʼ — same running tempo, similarly paced bassline, similar echoey fanfare effects on the guitar lines — and, essentially, it is about running like hell, as the poor sheep blindly follow the pigs and end up running away from the dogs, to no avail. The entire track is permeated with paranoia (best illustrated by the bassline) and terror (best illustrated by the way the vocals at the end of each line mutate and crossfade into an electronic banshee wail, only to be abruptly cut off with a thunderblast), but the creepiest and most insulting moment at the same time is the deconstruction of Psalm 23 — one of Waters' smartest anti-religious jabs, by the way: how many of us have ever thought that "The Lord is my shepherd" would quite logically surmise that, soon enough, "with bright knives he releaseth my soul, he converteth me to lamb cutlets"? The track does insinuate that, eventually, the sheep rise up, generate some brain activity, and get rid of their oppressors, but somehow it still seems more like a sarcastic dream than a reality (I mean, who ever saw a sheep "through quiet reflection and great dedication master the art of karate"?), and the triumphant martial guitar riff that fades out at the end of the song never feels anything like a glorious, optimistic conclusion to the whole concept.

And that conclusion? ʻPigs On The Wing 2ʼ, which essentially admits that the only way to get away from the unholy triumvirate of dogs, pigs, and sheep (in which pigs play a particularly disgusting part) is to find yourself an understanding partner and go hide in the woods or something like that. In a way, it is a pretty happy ending, and I will not deny that sometimes I feel exactly the same way...

If I were the Dalai Lama, I would probably reserve a harsh judgement for the album's concept and its unflattering stance on all human castes. Not having the honor, I do reserve the right to share opinions that are close enough to Waters' and, therefore, cannot blame Animals for any conceptual or ideological flaws. I could probably complain about the tracks being somewhat overlong, but instead of that, I would rather take the other way round and complain that there are simply not enough tracks — personally, I'd love to see more perspective on other inhabitants of the Farm as well, including horses, donkeys, cows, chickens, and whoever else was there in the original Orwellian world; more precisely, it just seems that Waters was on such a roll, surely he'd be able to find even more creative ways to ridicule and satirize even more categories of people, and I would love to see Animals, rather than The Wall, develop into the band's spatially grandest opus. Essentially, it is over much too quickly, yet I would not insist on getting ʻDogsʼ cut down to size in order to fit one or two additional pieces.

As for technicalities, I have always thought that, for some reason, the production standards on Animals were slightly below ideal, and that parts of it sound murkier than we'd come to expect. Compared to the crystal clear, heavenly ring of Gilmour's guitar on ʻShine Onʼ, for instance, the lead guitar parts on ʻDogsʼ are spoiled either by unnecessary timbre effects or by poor mixing, and overall, the record sometimes suffers from too much overkill on the effects. Maybe the presence of an Alan Parsons or even a Bob Ezrin could have helped, but, apparently, this was the way they (or at least Roger) wanted it to sound at the time, and perhaps the extra effects, distortion, and general murk were thought to accentuate the overall feel of disgust and contempt. That does not prevent us from applauding all the fantastic production decisions (the talkbox, the crossfades, the doom-laden looping of "stone... stone... stone..."), but I still think that a sharper sound couldn't have hurt in many individual places on the record; of all of the band's classic albums from that decade, I think Animals suffers the most in terms of production.

In conclusion, I would be the first to agree that a view of Animals as a «Roger Waters Vs. Mankind» kind of album would not only be oversimplifying stuff, but also would be portraying Waters, perhaps without proper justification, as a sort of monster. However, (a) I would never rule out such an interpretation, either and (b) it is a fun interpretation — and nobody said it was illegal to hold all mankind in one's contempt, anyway: Timon of Athens got away with this, so why shouldn't Roger Waters? The cool thing about art, anyway, is that we never have to agree with the artist — the only thing that matters is how effectively the artist gets his point across, and Animals passes that test with flying colors, an epic distillation of pure negativity in three parts. Had the record been made by anybody other than Pink Floyd, it would have probably sold less than a hundred copies; Floyd, however, played a cruel joke on their audiences, first transforming millions of people into their own loyal adepts by giving them a brief glimpse at The Meaning Of Life with Dark Side, and then suddenly turning around and delivering this mean blow right under the belt — perhaps the only reason why it did not eliminate their fanbase once and for all was that in early 1977 the average person felt so shitty about everything around him that the vibe seemed perfectly appropriate, even if it meant acknowledging one's own sheepishness. And although it would be hard to call the record particularly innovative or influential, it would be futile to deny that its relevance to this world of ours only continues to grow with each passing decade, because, let's face it, the place is still populated to the brink with Brahmin Pigs, Kshatriya Dogs, and Vaishya Sheep, and how many of us could firmly claim that we do not belong to any of the three categories?..